Bank of America and JPMorgan CEOs buy shares

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The chief executives of Bank of America Corp and JPMorgan Chase & Co bought some of their companies' stock in the last week, a sign of confidence as the banking sector struggles with soaring credit losses and a deep recession.

NEW YORK: Another strong gain for stocks Friday extended the market's recovery from a dismal start to the year to a fifth week in a row. The Standard and Poor's 500 index closed up for the year for the first time. The Dow Jones industrial average turned positive Thursday. Both had been down more than 10 percent for the year a little more than a month ago. The Dow rose 120.81 points Friday, or 0.7 percent, to 17,602.30. It is up 1 percent for the year. The S&P 500 gained 8.99 points, or 0.4 percent, to 2,049.58, and is now up 0.3 percent for 2016.

Bank of America Corp, the No. 2 U.S. bank by assets, reported its biggest quarterly profit in nearly four years on Wednesday as mortgage banking revenue soared and expenses fell to their lowest since the financial crisis.
BofA’s legal expenses, which have totaled at least US$70 billion since 2008, dropped for the second straight quarter, suggesting the worst of the bank’s legal problems stemming from the financial crisis was behind it.

Bank of America Corp (BAC) may pay the Department of Justice more than $12 billion to settle civil inquiries related to the bank’s handling of sub-prime mortgages, which is widely held to have contributed to the 2008 financial crisis. The new settlement that BofA is negotiating with the Justice Department will take the total amount in settlements by the bank related to its pre-crisis operations to at least $18 billion.

Bank of America Corp (BAC), the second-largest bank in the US by total assets, has been troubled with lawsuits and penalties over shoddy mortgage sales during the run up to the financial crisis of 2008.